Friday, December 5, 2014: I watched the countdown to the perfect launch of Orion, the first test flight of a capsule that may someday take humans to Mars. It brought back memories of the glory days of NASA. Grand events like that take careful advance planning, a team of skilled and enthusiastic people, and the perfect base of operations. Oh yeah, cooperative weather, as well. Afterwards, I baked two almond chicken casseroles. It was also the...

Squish! A giant blob of strawberry fruit punch splatted against the ceiling. Darn! It had crawled out the straw in my drink container. As I reached to clean it up, spaghetti floated off my spoon. If that wasn’t weird enough, a tortilla suddenly whizzed like a flying saucer by my head. Mealtime in space was always entertaining. When I began work at NASA in 1978, one of my first assignments as an Astronaut was to represent our office in decisions...

What would it be like to have a job where your employer wants to keep you healthy and is willing to pay to ensure it? Being an astronaut was like that. November is my birthday month which means it’s time to go to Houston for my annual physical exam. NASA likes to keep track of any health effects of spaceflight, so I am invited back each year to be tested. I applied for the program in 1977 and went to the Johnson Space Center for a week of...

There I was, hanging under a parachute over Florida’s Biscayne Bay having just been flung off the back of a flat top boat like a parasailer.  Soon I would be floating down to the bay only to be dragged along on my belly through the water until I could manage to disconnect from the chute.  I was about a month into my training and already I had to prove myself at a water survival course.  There followed many other tasks—both mental and...

In 1978 NASA selected thirty-five new Astronauts for the Space Shuttle.  There were six female astronauts in the class: Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and me. I was the smallest. We had to figure out how to fit into a world populated almost entirely by men, most of whom were engineers and pilots.  We women understood that we would have to act as a team on some things but that we’d be in competition for...